The Effect of Gender and Relational Distance on Plaintiff Decision Making in the Litigation Process

Individuals’ choices about whether to resolve disputes via litigation can be affected by their relationship with the potential defendant. I explore whether gender also plays a role, with women being less aggressive in legal tactics than men as their connection to the potential defendant becomes closer. The study uses a survey design with vignettes to explore decisions across the legal process, including the willingness to sue, responses to settlement offers, and whether or not to appeal. The survey varies the extent of the relationship between the potential plaintiff and defendant and includes two types of injuries—a “slip and fall” and pay discrimination. The findings reveal that once litigation has begun, women have a greater preference than men for mediation in both types of cases, but they are more resistant than men to settlement in discrimination disputes. Neither men nor women's legal strategies seem to be affected by relational distance.     

Predictors of Child Behavior Problems among Children of Female Vietnam Veterans

This study examined the impacts of intimate partner aggression by female Vietnam veterans and their male partners on their children’s behavior problems (N = 100 children). Veteran and partner psychological distress were also examined as potential mediators of these relationships. Results indicated that physical and psychological aggression perpetration by both the female veteran and the male partner was associated with child behavior problems. Contrary to expectations, psychological distress in the veteran and partner was not associated with child behavior problems and did not mediate the effects of physical and psychological aggression on this outcome.     

The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

As part of a special issue on the geographies of citizenship, this paper considers the longstanding and popular metaphor of “the body politic” for a polity. The metaphor's comparative power is successful because it imports key geographic assumptions about how polities are best organized. It makes claims about society and space (premises about location, spatial organization), nature–society relations (how the two spheres do and do not connect) and cartographic representation (the human body is the optimal representation of spatial and natural relations in a polity). We describe three ways in which geographical imaginations are constructed: organic, mechanical, and posthuman bodies politic. Our goal is twofold: first is to consider the ways the deployment of the metaphor of the body is used in political theory to convey a normative conception of citizenship; second is to bridge the gap between political theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is a space. The metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships.     

Location "Authority" in the Global Political Economy

This article addresses the problematic nature of "authority" in the global political economy. Focusing on the rules governing international commercial relations, which today form part of the juridical conditions of global capitalism, the location and structure of political authority are argued to be historically specific. They have changed with the emergence of different historic blocs and as a result of consequent alterations in state-societyrelations. The article emphasizes the significance of private corporate power in the construction of the global political economy and hegemonic authority relations. However, the significance of private authority is obscure and little understood by students of international relations. This gives rise to analytical and normative grounds for adopting a historical materialist approach to theanalysis of global authority that incorporates national, subnational, and transnational influences.     

Politics of exclusion and institutional transformation in Ethiopia

Ethiopia experienced a critical juncture in 1991 with the defeat of the military dictatorship, opening up the possibilities of a new political order. Since then the country underwent social engineering and institutional transformation emerging as a leading reformist state under hegemonic-party rule with high institutional state capacity but also a concentration, and even personalisation, of decision-making power. This approximates to a path of ‘authoritarian institutionalisation’. This article argues that Ethiopia’s institutional trajectory can be explained by the nature of coalition politics in the formative years of transition, specifically the extent to which credible challengers were excluded from transitional processes. The strategy of excluding Pan-Ethiopian parties and sideling the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) set the country on the path of establishing a hegemonic rule by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Sustaining hegemonic rule entailed fending off threats from excluded groups in the 1990s but which coalesced into a strong electoral performance in the 2005 elections in whose aftermath the ruling party embarked on aggressive pursuit of state-directed development for political legitimation.